


Monsters

by Anonymous



Category: Stargate (1994), Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22817518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Just why did General West send a -nuke- on the first Abydos mission?
Kudos: 7
Collections: Anonymous





	Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little bit of wild speculation disguised as fic. It fits in the world of the original movie and the SG1 world although nothing of SG1 is referenced.

Dr Dorothy Brown, nee West, did not keep in close contact with her younger brother. Her former husband was long gone, her children were grown – and were busy raising her grandchildren – but her friends were numerous and between quilting, book club, lecturing in Women’s Studies at Berkeley and her garden, she really didn’t feel Harold, (Major General in the Airforce and blessed with a devoted wife, four children and three grandchildren) was in need of her attention. Nevertheless, when Harold called to say he was retiring from the Air Force at last, and he and his wife would be in the area by the weekend, Dorothy assured him that she would be delighted to host them for a night

Harold and Diane West arrived late in the afternoon; Dorothy put away the essays she was grading and occupied herself in the kitchen as her guests settled in.

When sat at the table, they all chatted easily enough. Dorothy reported on her youngest grandson’s milestones, Harold and Diane talked about their plans to settle in Portland and looking forward to being near their youngest daughter who had just announced she was expecting her first. Dorothy mentioned that her tomatoes had done well this year but her plum trees had suffered damage in a recent storm. Diane nattered about the trials of being allergic to lilies and Harold drank more of the wine than usual.

After dessert, Diane excused herself, citing a headache and claiming she would go to bed early. Harold finished the wine and helped himself to Dorothy’s new bottle of cognac, pouring himself enough to make his sister frown as she took the plates to the sink and attended to the clean up. When her kitchen was as pristine as she liked it, she attended to laundry and finally sat down in the lounge and took up her patchwork.

An hour later, Dorothy realised her brother was still at the table and put down her sewing to check on him. Once there, she blinked at how far the level in the cognac bottle had dropped _and_ the empty brandy snifter. “Harry?”

He didn’t respond immediately, just stared into his nearly-empty glass.

“Harry!” Dorothy’s tone sharpened and she returned the near-empty bottle to it’s proper place on the sideboard.

“Is just memories.”

With a soft sigh, Dorothy sat back down. “Memories of a retired general?”

“Not so much. Do you… do you remember our parents stories?”

Dorothy thought that a stupid question; she was eight years older and had been fifteen when their parents had died. He’d only been seven. “Which ones?”

“About the gods of Egypt.”

“Of course I do!” she said shortly. “Not that _you’ve_ mentioned them in what… forty years?”

“I always hated how they didn’t have an ending.”

Perhaps she should tell him the rest of the stories. The ones she’d only learned as a teenager, the ones their parents had solemnly promised were truth, handed down through through the generations of their family for thousands of years. “Really? ‘Ra left’ wasn’t an ending?”

Harold almost snarled at that. “No!” Then a slight smile flicked over his expression. “But it has an ending now – Ra is dead.”

Dorothy froze, just for a moment. “Dead?”

“Dead. Nuked. Gone.”

“Nuked?”

“Doorway to heaven… it was a doorway to _hell_.”

Numb cold twisted Dorothy’s stomach. She was too old for this. “A stone ring, as tall as four men.”

He was drunk, knew he shouldn’t be talking. But he needed tell her, tell her that the monster they’d been warned about so many years ago was _gone_. “They found it in Giza – you can probably find references somewhere, from before it was classified.”

“No.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder how true those stories were? Why mom and dad told us never to tell anyone about them?”

“ _No._ ”

“When I saw it, when I saw the damned _aliens_ that had been buried beneath it…”

“Harry, what did you _do_?”

“Sent some damned good men to their deaths. Made sure they had the bomb.”

“Oh, _Harry_...”

“Story ended, Dot. Ra’s dead. Planet saved.”

Dorothy made herself breathe. Slow and steady. Looking at her brother, she assessed his state and sighed. “Come on, Harry. You need to go to bed.”

With her guidance stopping Harold from walking into the walls along the way, he even managed to get to bed on his own two feet and Dorothy shut the door to the guest room in relief. Leaning forward, she rested her head against the cool wood for a long moment before shaking herself.

She walked the house silently, switching off the lights and checking the locks as she always did but ending in her study instead of her bed. Booting up the computer and turning on the modem, she wrote a brief email to her middle son, summoning him to visit as soon as her guests were gone in the morning.

Dear heaven, she wished those stories were just stories. Myths and legends, spun into bedtime tales, no more real than Little Red Riding Hood.

But most of all, she wished Harry had known that Ra had only been _one_ of the monsters.


End file.
